gator, may be missed by another, equally honest and
equally diligent.

Those who inquire, whether a smaller number of legal votes can elect a
representative in opposition to a greater, must receive, from every
tongue, the same answer.

The question, therefore, must be, whether a smaller number of legal
votes shall not prevail against a greater number of votes not legal.

It must be considered, that those votes only are legal which are legally
given, and that those only are legally given, which are given for a
legal candidate.

It remains, then, to be discussed, whether a man expelled can be so
disqualified by a vote of the house, as that he shall be no longer
eligible by lawful electors.

Here we must again recur, not to positive institutions, but to the
unwritten law of social nature, to the great and pregnant principle of
political necessity. All government supposes subjects; all authority
implies obedience: to suppose in one the right to command what another
has the right to refuse, is absurd and contradictory; a state, so
constituted, must rest for ever in motionless equipoise, with equal
attractions of contrary tendency, with equal weights of power balancing
each other.

Laws which cannot be enforced can neither prevent nor rectify disorders.
A sentence which cannot be executed can have no power to warn or to
reform. If the commons have only the power of dismissing, for a few
days, the man whom his constituents can immediately send back; if they
can expel, but cannot exclude, they have nothing more than nominal
authority, to which, perhaps, obedience never may be paid.

The representatives of our ancestors had an opinion very different: they
fined and imprisoned their members; on great provocation, they disabled
them for ever; and this power of pronouncing perpetual disability is
maintained by Selden himself.

These claims seem to have been made and allowed, when the constitution
of our government had not yet been sufficiently studied. Such powers are
not legal, because they are not necessary; and of that power which only
necessity justifies, no more is to be admitted than necessity obtrudes.

The commons cannot make laws; they can only pass resolutions, which,
like all resolutions, are of force only to those that make them, and to
those, only while they are willing to observe them.

The vote of the house of commons has, therefore, only so far the force
of a law, as that force is necessary to preserve t